Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir
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In 1997 foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe. After witnessing the devastating consequences of AIDS and economic disaster on the country’s children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage where a critically ill infant, abandoned in a field on the day she was born, was trusted to their care. Within weeks, Chipo, the baby girl whose name means “gift,” would come to mean everything to them. Their decision to adopt her, however, would challenge an unspoken social norm: that foreigners should never adopt Zimbabwean children. Against a background of war, terrorism, disease, and unbearable uncertainty about the future, Chipo’s true story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love—and dogged determination—can sometimes achieve. The Washington Post Tucker's writing is taut and vivid as he narrates his and his wife's tumultuous quest to adopt Chipo … This book is billed as "A Family Memoir," but it is a cross between a foreign correspondent's dispatches and a family tale. Nor is Love in the Driest Season etched with the literary filigree that marks other books in the genre. But that does not diminish its importance and certainly not its readability. Ultimately it is the story of the evolution of a mother and father, whose determination to save a doomed child makes that child theirs. — Adam Fifield
Prologue11People Like Us72Let's Stay Together173The Girl-Child254Fitting In365"Breathe, Baby, Breathe"556Away from Home697Vital Signs788Mississippi Redux939Children of the Dry Season10310"Rejected"12011Rain13112Persona Non Grata13913Choosing Chipo15314The Paper Trail15815"Shortcuts"17316House of Echoes19117Betrayed20418Friends and Foes22219On the Record23120West Toward Home242Epilogue255Afterword262Acknowledgments267
